Chantal Janzen looks back on the birth of birthday boy Bobby: ‘Lucky Charm’ | RTL Boulevard

Six years ago, on March 29, 2018, Chantal, who had previously given birth to son James, was induced. “Around 5 p.m. I was 4 centimeters dilated,” she remembers. ‘Luckily he didn’t think at the time: let me work it out, because then I would never have been able to cycle again (among other things).’ A storm of labor followed, which Chantal knows how to describe aptly. ‘I tried to tune out as much as possible, but at that moment I felt like I was stuck in a shredder from the stomach down.’

Chantal received an epidural. ‘The moment the anesthetist said in the middle of one of the most painful contractions: ‘You have to bend over now’, I wanted to shout: ‘Die, Jeroen’, but I said ‘OOOKEEEEEE’ and that was better. For Jeroen.’ And then it was there, Bobby. ‘At 10.30 pm a baby was born who was not crying, which shocked me and I shouted: ‘Is he okay?’

Fortunately, everything was fine with Bobby. “He already had a kind of smile on his face then,” Chantal says about her then newborn son. ‘Afterwards I thought that only I saw this, with the help of the morphine pump, but Marco saw it too.’ This earned Bobby a special nickname. ‘Your grandmother, my mother, calls you ‘The Eternal Smile’. And she’s right about that.’

Chantal also writes that after Bobby was born, she “cried for a long time out of happiness” when she returned home. ‘I looked at Bobby and thought, everything is fine. (…) We all love you so much, our little lucky charm. You are a sun in so many lives. And now you’re six. I look forward to all that is yet to come with you.”